Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Ladies & Gentlemen, please allow me to show you the somewhat disturbing paintings of David Van Gough. I saw Mr. Van Gough's paintings recently on a documentary currently streaming on Netflix called "Serial Killer Culture" by John Borowski. The documentary is about collectors, and artists that are fascinated by serial killers. No big surprise, Tex Watson doesn't make one appearance in the documentary, even though, technically, he is more of serial killer than Manson. Nobody collects, or paints Tex? Are you surprised? Manson looks better on canvas, I suppose. Actually, Tex was a spree killer, right? Anyway, continuing.....

I have to admit, the documentary, and Mr. Van Gough's paintings are highly disturbing to me, and I could never display them in my home. The third painting down is supposed to be Sharon Tate alive on the left, then Sharon Tate dead on the right. He included the cut on her face that Tex felt the need to do when murdering her. Jeepers Creepers!

From David Van Gough's website, the reader is told "Mining the dark recesses of a fevered subconscious, combined with the post millennial paranoia of impending doom, David Van Gough is a Necrorealist painter." Yep-I agree with that description, but hey-to each their own! He is talented, I will give him that! A link to his website can be found here.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Here is an article from the September 29, 1967 issue of the Berkeley Barb when Kenneth Anger first reports that his film Lucifer Rising is stolen. It does not appear that Anger initially suspected Bobby Beausoleil of stealing the film. There were thefts from other performers at the Straight Theatre around the same time, too.

Monday, December 22, 2014

First time ever on the web in its entirety with the original magazine cover, photos & graphics!

It isn't often one interviews a personality whose mere name commands attention - and a healthy bit of fear - around the globe. That name is CHARLES MILLES MANSON. But even with such notoriety, a short introduction to the following conversation is necessary, lest we wish to go the way of the hundreds of media interviews with Manson in the last twenty-six years and merely reinforce the spoon-fed opinions of the imbecilic Geraldo nation. Manson's reputation as the "most infamous mass murderer of all time" has certainly managed to provide steady headlines for decades, not to mention a multi-million dollar cottage industry of movies, true-crime books, t-shirts and television specials. There's only one major flaw in the scenario: Manson didn't kill anyone. And while he may have a media image uncannily similar to that of "the wickedest man in the world", magickian Aleister Crowley, at least the latter walked free.

Convicted of conspiracy to commit the "Helter Skelter" murders of Sharon Tate and friends on August 8th, 1969 and Leno and Rosemary La Bianca the next night, Manson still resolutely maintains his innocence to this day. Is he guilty? Well, maybe, if you still believe in witchcraft - and the resemblances between the courthouses of Eighteenth Century Salem and Twentieth Century Los Angeles may not be coincidental. The real unanswered question of the whole affair still remains: What was the motive? If you would listen to prosecute Vincent "the Bug" Bugliosi, the murders were directed by Manson to jump-start a race war called Helter Skelter. Through circuitous and failed logic, Bugliosi painted a picture to the jury (and readers of his best seller Helter Skelter) of Manson as a simultaneously pathetic misfit and superhuman genius of Hitlerian proportions. While it may not have added up according to the laws of reason, it certainly did in terms of deposits in Bugliosi's personal bank account. With numerous more tenable explanations for the crimes, one wonders how a jury could believe the Beatles' White Album was a blueprint for murder, and besides, why attempt to start a race war that's already been in progress since the beginning of time? So much for common sense in the Court of the People. And what was the tangible long-term result of this farcical trial? Manson is more popular than ever, having been embraced by the disillusioned youth of this country on an unparalleled scale.

No stranger to the "Hallways of the Always," as he terms it, Charlie has spent the better part of his life in prison, beginning with minor convictions for a few petty victimless crimes in the 1950's. And it was then, while incarcerated at Terminal Island, California that Manson started picking up guitar lessons from one of the lifers there - Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, a member of the original Ma Barker gang. Music would play a great role in the rest of Charlie's life, for it was through it that, upon his parole in 1967, he began to attract the attention of a circle of intelligent young California White girls who'd left their bourgeois suburban homes behind. His musical talent also brought him into the fold of numerous Hollywood hipsters, most notably Dennis Wilson, who convinced his Beach Boys to record an original Manson tune, "Cease to Exist" for their 20/20 album and to release it on a single b-side. While he receives no writer's credit, and the band changed the title to "Never Learn Not to Love," the song is unmistakably Manson's. The original "family" version can be found on the "LIE" album (now a CD), a collection of demo recordings from 1968-69 that music industry parasite (and jail acquaintance of Manson's) Phil Kaufman released in 1971. The record has been in print ever since, and has undergone innumerable bootleg editions.

LIE wan't the only Manson material to see eventual release, as another set of vintage recordings, titled The Manson Family Sings, saw daylight in an unauthorized LP release a few years ago. Supposedly uncovered in the MCA archives, the tapes feature Steve "Clem" Grogan and some of the Manson girls doing a number of impressive songs written by Charlie, who was unable to participate - at the time of the recording, the Trial of the Century" was already underway. The material has since been bootlegged on CD by another set of musical parasites, UK's Grey Matter label. These same disreputable folks have also issued a CD of Manson's prison recordings, Live at San Quentin - a completely erroneous title as Manson was never even allowed a guitar during his stay there. In the early 1980's, however, Manson was granted extended freedoms while at the Vacaville Medical Facility near Sacramento. It was during a gig helping the prison chaplain that Charlie recorded a number of cassette letters, intended for friends on the outside, that contained songs, stories, and rants - almost all of which were done straight off the cuff, stream-of-consciousness style. Some of the best of the Vacaville tapes were recently collected on the Commemoration CD (White Devil Records) in honor of Manson's sixtieth birthday last year. Excluding the questionable LIE album, Commemoration is the first release of his music ever to be sanctioned by Manson, and given the circumstances under which it was recorded, the sound is surprisingly good. Upcoming releases from White Devil include two 7" singles of unreleased songs, with sleeves feature stunning Manson portraits by his longtime friend Nick Bougas.

How to describe Charlie's music? Well, it has to be heard to be believed. A combination of singing and storytelling - the roots of which lie in the Kentucky Hillbilly Music he grew up with in the forties, and the music and poetry of Beatniks he ran with in the fifties, the subject matter ranges from the deadly serious to the humorous, from the searching to the spiritual. At the bottom of it all is Manson's one main concern: survival. To Charlie, survival on Earth can be summed up as his acronym ATWA - Air, Trees, Water, Animals. Without ATWA, we're all done for. Case closed.

No doubt we'll catch a lot of flak here for trying to "sanitize" Manson's image and downplay his supposed transgressions. But given twenty-six years of bad press, it's only fair that the man should finally get a chance to speak unfettered. No one's claiming Charlie is a saint, least of all himself. In his own words: "I'm god to my friends and the devil to my enemies." Due to his fame and attention, small-minded and jealous prison authorities have consistently mistreated him and denied him his rights which other inmates (who did commit cold-blooded murder) take for granted. The following conversation is a pastiche of numerous discussions, and makes no claim to be remotely definitive in its scope. It is, however, possibly the first time Manson's words have ever appeared truly uncensored in print, which means those of you with thirty second TV attention spans will probably be left in the dust, scratching your empty heads. Some will choose to ignore it and others will take offense, but the bottom line of Manson's outlook is that he knows what needs to be done to save his world. Can you say the same for yours?

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SECONDS: What can you tell us about the music you're playing now?

MANSON: I've never really sat down and took this serious, until the last two or three times I've been playing. I've never let this part of me come out. I'm a hobo, and I've been on the road since I was just a little kid. I've got a lot of good songs that I never let anybody see because I don't want them stealing 'em. I don't really open up, 'cause if I open up I'll never live to get out of here. They'll steal every fucking drop of my blood. There's no mercy in these bastards, because they're not even there--there's no intelligent life forms. They're all living in something somebody else made and then retired. Like everybody set their life out in motion, and then they went off and retired, or died, or went somewhere else. Then all these other guys, these kids that grow up--they're wearing everybody else's shoes and riding around in everybody else's car, and they don't have nothing of their own, not really. Everything they've got comes from somewhere else. So when you come up with something new, that's like meat to a vulture. They just sit around and wait for you to do something, and push you to do something, and as soon as you do it, they jump on it and eat it up so quick that it don't even look like you're doing anything.

Charles Manson 'Commemoration'

SECONDS: Seconds gave your CD a four-star review.

MANSON: What's a four-star review?

SECONDS: They said it sounded great.

MANSON: That's cool. If they liked that they sure will like this other stuff. I've got a whole lot better music--that's really repetitious, up and down, kind of country-bumpkin stuff.

SECONDS: What else have you been playing?

MANSON: I've got some new style things--they're not new to life, but they're new to music--like going into a trance, putting yourself in a trance, and coming from the spiritual world with other lifeforms that have lived before. And I'm not talking about something phony--this can be done. But it can't be done for inspection, it can't be done consciously. It has to be a total oblivion, unconscious thing that only happens every once in awhile, it just sneaks through every once in awhile and happens. And I just happened to get some of that, about some Navaho, some Indians, and some different things.

SECONDS: There's not a lot of noise in the background on the CD, which is pretty incredible considering it was recorded in prison.

MANSON: See, where I'm at, you don't realize--there was one place in there where someone was talking, and later on, off the tape, I had to go down and shut him up. If anyone sings on the tier, everyone tells him, "What the fuck, why don't you shut up"! and start cat-calling you and all that shit, 'cause you've got a lot of jealousy in here. And to sing you've got to kind of hold everyone else to attention, and that's not very easy--one guy to hold all these convicts in place while he does something that they don't want to hear anyway. One time we were doing a music session in Vacaville in one cell, and in the next cell some guy got killed. It came out on the tape and they subpoenaed the tape and took it to court! They sat there listening to this music and some guys screaming in the back, "Arrhhh!" It was really a weird tape, kind of a morbid tape.

MANSON: A Hobo Suit is one suit of clothes, and then you never have to buy another suit of clothes as long as you live. In other words, you've got a suit of clothes and you can just get up on the road and go. You never have to worry about clothing rooms or clothing stores or nothing. It's got elk skin pants and a shirt, with a pouch like a pocket book that you can throw over your shoulder that you can use to keep your knife, your sharpening stone, your needles, some thread--you know, enough to police your Hobo Suit, to keep it in one perspective. Then you don't ever need another set of clothes, you don't ever have to worry about nothing you can just get up on the road with that.

SECONDS: And elk skin will last a lifetime?

MANSON: Yeah. It'd be like your skin. You just get in the shower once in a while, scrub it down, then run around the block two or three times and you'll be right there. Just give it a bath like you give yourself a bath and it should last you forever.

SECONDS: What else do you work on?

MANSON: I've got other kinds of little projects going. I've got these little plaque projects I'm doing--I put Family people's pictures on these little wooden plaques and then I finish 'em down, and people that have trailers, they put them on the wall in their trailer.

SECONDS: Sort of like folk art?

MANSON: Yeah, and then I've got a couple of guitars I've restored, I mean they're really tremendous. I got one from Spain that's hand-made and I've restored it and I did a painting--I painted the damn thing! It looks like modern art, like something that don't have wheels that should have wheels! It looks pretty cool. This is a strange place; the only thing they've got here is a hobby shop. They don't have no program at all, for anything. They don't have no gymnasium, no auditorium....

SECONDS: They're not even having you run in circles outside?

MANSON: Well no, they don't even have that. All they got's a little square box with one basketball court nobody plays in, a weightlifting bar--and not too many people lift, and then they've got a little hobby shop about the size of the toilet, and everybody works out of there. They make boats, paintings, a little jewelry, a little Pop Art, like you said. You know what I was told yesterday? I can't use my name anymore --I cant sign my name anymore!

SECONDS: They don't want you autographing?

MANSON: They don't want me signing my name. They say that my signing my name is causing too much trouble. It's making too much money. I'm not after no goddamn fucking money! I'm just trying to play on and go back into whatever I was doing before. I had a world I was working in before. I knew all this before. When I got out last time, I knew it was all a bunch of rotten apples. But I didn't figure I was any better than the worst of them, or any worse than the best. It's the same fucking thing, it's just a pile of shit anyway, so why not try to grow some flowers in it? That's when I got out, and I went through these other things, and then I got trapped up in these kids of the Sixties. But I'm not a kid of the Sixties; I'm a kid of the Forties. Bing Crosby was my hero, not Elvis Presley. I never even liked Elvis Presley he was a rhinestone to me, he wasn't a diamond, that's for damn sure.

SECONDS: What are you conveying with your music?

MANSON: I'm not really an entertainer. I'm a hobo more than an entertainer. 'Im like Woody Guthrie, you know I just rap and talk about ATWA, and bullshit...tell poems. 'Im not a Hippie; I'm a Beatnik. I was doing this, beatin' on bongos and shit, before the Hippies came into play. So I got a lot of weird old poems that are not in books, and I've got a lot of chants and tongues that kind of passed down from generation to generation.

SECONDS: What did you think of Rock and Roll? Your stuff isn't really anything like it.

MANSON: I was into Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell--Hobo Music, Hillbilly Music. Not Country Music, like all those fake Willie Nelson motherfuckers. It's just a bunch of assholes.

SECONDS: They're just selling an image now.

MANSON: I think a guy called Hitler said it: It 's a Jewish problem. Because everything we get going, they'll end up selling it to us. As soon as Hank Williams died, they bought his guitar and gave it to Bobby Dylan, then they told the world that Bobby Dylan was actually Hank Williams, and that he'd been up on the road and that he was a hobo. And they bought up a whole bunch of these I love you babies in my big brass bed, and gave him the songs and put him up as a star, you dig, and they sold the image of Hank Williams through Zimmerman. It's the same thing they've done all the way down the line, every time one of us dies they just buy up the graveyard and sell it back to us. Every time we make a mistake and back up they just move on in, 'til they end up running it. They're slick motherfuckers, they're running it.

SECONDS: What happened with your music back when you got out in 1967?

MANSON: When I went to Hollywood they offered me these positions and I told them, "No, no." And then they want to pick who's gonna play in my band, and who's gonna do this, and I told them, "No, I cant". So then the Jew told me, he said, "As long as you're in this town you'll never get no music out". In other words, they want to control the music. I'm not a racist kind of guy; I never thought one way or another what a guy is, but then I see how the Second World War has made people racists whatever racist is. We're all for ourselves to start with, so that makes us racists. I've got to be for me first. And then I look and see, what the fuck am I? And then I say, well, I'm Irish, so I've got to be with that first. If I'm not with Irish first then how the fuck can I ever be with anyone else? I've got to be with me, and I've got to be with green.

SECONDS: You start at home and move out from there.

MANSON: Yeah, yes sir! But it's hard to get home and straighten 'er out... I've been lost for 700 years, just floating around in space. I didn't know where I come from or go to I never even thought about it until it was thrown on me to think about it. In other words, at the end of your life you look off into the gas chamber and say, "What am I going in here for? What am I giving my life up for everyday? What is this all about?" And then when you figure it all out you've just got to be what you are.

SECONDS: What did you think of Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys?

MANSON: I liked him. And he cheated me.

SECONDS: They did one song of yours, Never Learn Not to Love.

MANSON: There's more than one song; they stole a bunch of my shit. Here's what he did: I told him, "I sure like this house". He said, "I'll give you this house if you help me write some songs, and teach me how to play the way you play". He said he wanted to make an album on his own, and I said, "Okay, Ill help you". He said, "Consider this house as yours", and then I said, "Well, what are you going to give me for that song?" He said, "I'll give you this Silver Cloud". So he gave me the Rolls-Royce, and I said, "Where's the pink slip?" He says, "I've got to get it from my business manager. It's in the company's name". So he was always getting it from his business manager, and then I would go up to his business manager and say, "Hey, when you gonna pay me?" And his business manager'd say, "You better leave me alone, I'll call New York, I'll call New York!" he was an Italian. And they didn't want to pay me. They owed me that house and they owed me that car, but they didn't want to pay me.

SECONDS: They never gave them to you?

MANSON: Fuck no, they didn't give me shit.

SECONDS: Didn't Dennis Wilson give you a motorcycle?

MANSON: No, Neil Young gave me that.

SECONDS: Did you actually hang out with him?

MANSON: Sure, why not? I hang out with all them people, that's my neighborhood. I lived in Elvis Presley's house, man. He ran me out of the yard. I got mad at him, I was going to to throw some rocks at him, ‘cause I thought he was an idiot, an egotistical fucking punk. I never liked him even a little bit, but everybody else always kow-towed to him because he was rich and everything. But to me that don't mean shit. I don't give a fuck how rich you are, I'll bust you up anyway.

SECONDS: Was there anyone else you ran into back then?

MANSON: Frank Zappa. He's a no good, thieving motherfucker! I knew a lot of those guys.

SECONDS: Tell me how the LIE album came about.

MANSON: A guy come up to me and I've got a tape. He said, "Gimme that tape and I'll make an album". I told him, "Man, I don't give a fuck about none of that shit". He said, "Can I have the album, can I have the tape?" I said, "Go ahead, take it on". So he went on with the tape and he made an album called LIE.

SECONDS: That was Phil Kaufman?

MANSON: Yeah. Now, he went into the record company and told the dude, "Look, I'll give you a nickel for each record you press". The guy made 600,000 copies. He paid the guy a nickel on each one, a nickel on something. I forgot what the fuck it was, a nickel on the dollar, a nickel on the album, or something like that. But he got 600,000 copies in the back of his car, and he went off and he sold 'em for something like five dollars a piece.

SECONDS: He just drove around selling the records?

MANSON: No, no--he put an ad in Easy Rider magazine. And in the Free Press. So he sold 600,000 at five dollars a copy. 600,000 five dollar bills is what? Thats a nice piece of change. And all he had to do was farm out five percent here, six percent here, two cents on the dollar for that--he gave everybody a little bit of the action and he ended up with a big fucking hunk of change--sent me a picture of a Rolls-Royce over in France talking about, "You wouldn't blame me for doing what you would do?" And I told him, "No, I sure couldn't".

SECONDS: He's selling a book about himself now.

MANSON: Yeah, he's got a book and he's over in Nashville. He's still riding on my music, he's still riding on me. All these guys are riding on me...

SECONDS: How did Phil Kaufman get in contact with you?

MANSON: I was in jail with him for a long time. He was cool in jail, he was alright. A lot of the guys are alright in jail 'cause you can touch 'em and you can bust em up if they're not alright. You can get ahold of them. But as soon as they get out and they feel like you can't get ahold of em, you can't get your hands on them, then they can do anything they want. So it's a whole different game. In here, I have guys that I get along with well, they're perfect. But get 'em out the gate, man, as soon as they're out the gate they'd steal my eyes and teeth if they could.

SECONDS: Would you say you play music just for yourself?

MANSON: I play for the experience of--the feeling of--because I like playing it it makes me feel good. And if the other people don't like it, I really don't care. I'm doing it for how I feel. I can't say that someone else's approval hasn't got something to do with it, but not that much. I like doing it, and then once it's done, it's gone. I'm not laboring with yesterday. Yesterday went on down the river. I don't think of too much tomorrow, I can pretty much live on today. So I just try to have a good day and play music and be in harmony in everything I do. I try to stay out of the bullshit and confusion of other people, if I can...

SECONDS: But they'll try to rope you in every time.

MANSON: Yeah, they do. Sure they do.

SECONDS: Misery loves company.

MANSON: Sure, sure it does. So I just play, and trip, and try to stay out of the way of these--I've got a big old jealous snake on me, you see. If I look cool, or I get the attention, then other people don't like that. They want to be the one; everybody wants to be the one. Remember that song: "Everyone that is the one is looking for the door / And if you are the one my friend, you don't need to look anymore / And if you are a two, you know there's no place to go / Reckless hate we cant use, let it go." That's pretty much the same thing. Everybody wants to go through that one door; everybody wants to be that door. And if you see a bunch of little puppies being born; how little puppies will bowl each other over to get to you and they're stepping on each others heads to establish the pecking order.

SECONDS: Who's going to get that nipple.

MANSON: Yeah, and it's always a selection of who's going to be stronger, or better, or taller, or louder, or sing better whatever. And as you and I sit here arguing with each other or squabbling over who's going to do the music, the Jew is paying Michael Jackson to do it.

SECONDS: You saw who he married, didn't you?

MANSON: Yeah, well, he's breeding it all into: goodbye, Moynihan see you later, we don't need your kind anymore! In a country that says We don't like the White males, doesn't that tell you something? Who's controlling the opinion to decide that we don't like the White males and we only want the White pussy? In other words, whose mind are we in?

SECONDS: What's the situation like where you are now?

MANSON: The way this place works is that everybody wants everybody below them, and then they all feel like they're superior. Anytime in any shape or form something rises above them, they all feel like they're a bunch of insecure little kids running around, playing cops and robbers with uniforms on. They really don't know what they're doing, because the people that set up this shit already retired. Its a Mickey Mouse watch, is what it is. It's just a form that was set by the people who died; they're already dead. They set it with necessity, they didn't set it with anything positive, they just set it because they had to, and then it went on to something else. And the only way you can get over it is you gotta create situations where they have to change. You've almost got to go the point of death to get any kind of change and then its only for a second, before it closes right back up. It's like a big mechanical beast that runs on numbers and money.

SECONDS: Are you receiving any letters?

MANSON: No. I can't deal with it. What happens is, it's like you send me a picture of a goat. And then they get here and they say to me, "What are you doing with a picture of goat?" I say, "Well, it was sent to me from a friend". They say, "Well, Section 4453, Supplemented in '39, Made in '42, says: you're not allowed to have pictures of goats". So then they take my picture of the goats and they pass a rule. And then the rule sits out on the launch pad here, and they start making rules to everyone. Then they go around to everybody, they shake everybody's cell down and they take all the pictures of goats, and goats are disallowed all over the place. Well, that puts heat back up on me, then everybody that lost their goat looks over to me and says, "What the fuck, you're causin' us to lose our goat". So I have to carry that shit back through all these fuckin' inmates, and most of them don't have the I.Q. of 39. And then the administrators, they go off drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and making more stupid things up to torment people. It's crazy, but that doesn't matter because there's no one there anyway. Not really. No one I can find, no intelligent life forms. You see, here's the irony of this whole thing: if I were the emperor of the world, I'd start with you because you let it happen. The reason you let it happen is you let these guys work for you. These people represent you. You're paying these people to do this, and then when they do it to me you say, "Oh, well, I wish there was something I could do", and then you go right on back to doing the same thing that you're doin', in other words, you hold this insanity up, you watch it on TV...

SECONDS: Everyone's holding it up.

MANSON: I'm not saying you personally, guy. When I say you, I mean you as a goat. You as the you that's in all the other yous. Me and I and my mes are on this side of me, you know were not doing that. Were probably worse than that. They're probably a hell of a lot better than we are. Because I would put 'em in the gas chamber. I wouldn't give no probation, that's for damn sure. I certainly wouldn't be feeding a bunch of people that I didn't need to feed, and wasting all kinds of my money. I wouldn't waste my money on this insanity. So probably they're doing a better job than we would do in relation to human concern. But still, its you the Joe Public, John Jones, honest Citizen Kane, whatever, that's doing this because you're allowing these people to do this. All your public servants that used to be serving the public, they're public leeches, they just leech on the public's stupidity. And then they sell the public any fuckin' thing. You watch TV occasionally, don't you?

SECONDS: Every once in awhile.

MANSON: And you see how really far out it is?

SECONDS: I'm always more amazed every time I turn it on.

MANSON: Well, what we should be doing is making the films. I mean, if we're supposed to be the intelligence, then why aren't we laying the patterns out for them, rather than them layin' the patterns out for us? In other words, they've got all kinds of games that they play back to you, and you don't have enough sense to see through it. We should have been out of here a long time ago, and we should have had this thing rolling years ago. The only reason we haven't is because everybody wants to be an individual. No one wants to give up their individual for the collective base. You know, if you don't have a collective atmosphere towards some unity of something for some reason, then you're just a total blob, jellyfish, or whatever.

SECONDS: It was a bad day when everyone decided they were individuals.

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BTW, if you are interested in an original copy of this issue of Seconds, Aes-Nihil has a copy. Don't be second to order, he only has one.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Satan's Sadists was the second to the last movie filmed at Spahn Ranch before the fire that destroyed it. The last movie, of course, was Robert Hendrickson's Manson.

The movie starred Russ Tamblyn who was also in another movie filmed at Spahn, The Female Bunch. We did a few posts on that one, here , here and here .

Also in the film was Regina Carroll who, after the arrests for the Tate LaBianca murders, had some choice things to say about the Family and their actions at the time of the filming. That article can be read at CieloDrive . It's a good article that I wasn't able to find elsewhere online.

Supposedly Shorty can be seen in this film but according to Chatsworth Charlie who sent me the link to the movie, he couldn't find Shorty.

Was Paul Watkins interviewed in a "Mr. Big" sting police operation? What is a Mr. Big Sting? We figured you'd ask...

Undercover police officers pretend
to be members of a fake criminal organization. They attempt to
"recruit" a suspect to the fake gang in order to get him or her to
confess to prior crimes.

The officers slowly build
their suspect's trust, and ask him to do increasingly important jobs for
the organization. In the end, the officers introduce their suspect to
the fictitious leader of the organization. The so-called "Mr. Big" then
tells the suspect that the gang can help him, but only if he recounts
his entire criminal experience.

Rather than landing the potential gangster a role in a criminal organization, however, those confessions can send them to jail.

Remember Jake Friedberg, who (according to Watkins) put Paul up in a hotel suite for three days then vanished? Could it have been an early police "Mr Big" sting? Think about it... Paul is invited to meet 'Mr Big'. He wines and dines him, brags about the crimes they commit while making him comfortable enough to share his exploits to gain acceptance into their group. They tell him that they want to branch out and since Charlie is in jail they need Paul to be the new connection. But first, can they trust Paul? They want to get him to admit to some crimes in order to gain their trust and then... busted. But he didn't know anything he didn't already tell the LAPD, so they vanished and nobody knows who they were or where they went. By the way, this tactic is illegal in the United States, so it will never come out if that was actually what they were up to.

Below is a short excerpt from Paul's book, MY LIFE WITH CHARLES MANSON - by PAUL WATKINS and Guillermo Soledad (if you'd like to download a PDF of the book, CLICK HERE). It deals with Paul's encounter with Friedberg beginning on page 187:

After that episode, things happened fast. Later that same week I was coming out of the court building when a dapper little guy sporting a goatee and dressed in a double-breasted suit approached me, saying he was a lawyer and wanted to ask me a few questions. I walked with him to a chauffeured limousine and we drove up to Hollywood. He introduced himself as Jake Friedberg, saying he just wanted some information about the Family and that he'd make it worth my while to provide it. He asked if I'd mind staying at the Continental Hyatt House for a couple of days, and when I said no, he made a reservation for me in the penthouse. I spent two days there telling him what I knew; on the morning of the third day, as I was leaving the hotel, I was paged to the phone. It was Crockett; I'd called him the day I arrived and left my number.

His voice was hard and clear, like a pick against granite.

"Where the hell you been?"

Nowhere."

"I been tryin' to get you. D.A.'s office called us up and said that guy Friedberg is a Mafia man... somethin' about La Bianca's connection with the syndicate... he say anything about it?"

"Nope."

There was a long pause. Then Crockett spoke. "Where you tryin' to take yourself anyway, oblivion?"

I didn't answer. I didn't know.

"When you comin' out to the desert?"

"It won't be long."

I waited [for] Friedberg to come back, but he didn't. And I never saw him again.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Welcome to Part 5 (Beyond Good and Evil) of our 6 part series with Dr. Dave Williams, author of Searching For God in the Sixties. Each part is being presented on Mondays. Dr. Dave is making himself available to answer questions in the comments section.

One of Manson's proudest boasts is that he always spoke what he called the "truth": "I walk a real road. I am a real person. I'm not a phony. I don't put on no airs. I say what I think." What he meant by this is that he does not lie, that he insists on telling it as he believes it. In the parole hearing, he knew what the parole officers wanted to hear. He could have lied; he probably could have even lied successfully. He didn't. Asked what he might do if he was let out, would a hustling con have told the parole board, "I'll cheat. I'll steal. I'll do whatever I have to do to survive, and that's a reality"? But even in simple questions, when pressed for a yes or a no whether he had a family still waiting for him on the outside, he answered "I can't explain it to you man. It doesn't have a yes or no." All he has is what is in his mind. For him to give that up, to lie, would be to surrender the void back to the world, which is what society wants. Instead, he says to the court, "I showed you some strength. I haven't surrendered to this by copping out to yours or telling tales or playing weak…. You've done everything you can to me, and I'm still here."

This is part of the voice from the Infinite which Clem was drawn to. It was a large part of Manson's appeal for kids trying to escape from a sham suburban world of lies wrapped around lies wrapped around lies. "Manson is the only person I ever met who just tells you the truth and doesn't even understand someone having bad feelings about it," said Gypsy. "It's hard to live with a person who tells the truth all the time. Why? Because lots of time we don't want to hear the truth. Manson knows the truth because he knows nothing; he knows the power of an empty head."

But the ultimate irony is that in knowing the power of an empty head and how to use it, Manson also knew the destructive force of a whole civilization of empty heads all playing mindless games. He preached death to liberate his followers from the games of the old culture, games which were leading to wars, famine, oppression, the destruction of the planet. But the death of the old game-playing ego was only a prelude to the rebirth of the new spirit. Manson wasn't just a tree-shaker; he was also a jelly maker. Not just another deconstructionist proclaiming the void in all things, he saw the possibility of creating a new essential narrative. And it is in his horrifyingly honest articulation of his solution to humanity's dilemma that he fulfills Joan Didion's darkest paranoid fear, that out of this army of lost children would arise some fascist leader appealing to the cosmic mind inside everyone for which he was the self-appointed spokesman.

"Whoever is going to put order into the world," Manson tried to explain to Geraldo Rivera, "has to stumble across Hitler." Order is the answer to disorder. If the planet is to be saved from the rapacious destruction of human civilization, then, according to Manson, someone needs to "put order into the world." Manson even for a while set up his own organization with its own webpage (www.atwa.com) for this purpose. ATWA stands for Air, Trees, Water, Animals, the life which will be saved when he re-organizes our helter-skelter madness. Asked to explain the swastika he has cut into his forehead, Manson said, "How do you have Peace on Earth? How do you communicate to a whole group of people. You stand up and take the worst fear symbol there is and say, there, now I've got your fear. And your fear is your power and your power is your control. I'm your king of this whole planet. I'm gonna rule this world through ATWA. I want this world cleaned up." But the swastika is more than a symbol of fear. It is also a symbol of Hitler's particular attempt to put order into the world, an order that included each race staying within its own circle. Manson is definitely both anti-semitic and racist, to say nothing of sexist. He freely admits it. His idea of order is in fact more like that of the pre-war generations with which he identifies, than of the flower-children of the Sixties. The older generation had experienced the horror of the depression and the world war and wanted security. So did Manson. His ideas of social and political order were very old fashioned. He also admitted that he preferred the music of Frank Sinatra to the mayhem of Rock and Roll or even the Beatles. He wanted to overcome the chaos around him and restore a sense of order.

Manson once warned his parole board, "If I'm not paroled, and I don't get a chance to get back on top of this dream, you're gonna lose all your money, your farms aren't going to be able to produce. You're gonna win Helter Skelter. You're gonna win your reality." Whether this "I" refers to Manson the man or the universal "I" locked within each of us in the subconsciousness is, as usual, not at all clear. And it makes a difference. But in either case, Helter Skelter is the confusion of a world gone crazy and in need of order. "This dream" is the consciousness of mainstream society that is leading humanity into chaos and suicide. According to Manson, the liberation of the voice of the unconsciousness collective mind to organize all the unconscious minds into one big consciousness can change the dream in such a way as to prevent mankind from destroying the planet.

When Manson argued that his consciousness came from a deeper place "beyond good and evil," he at least conjured up in the minds of more learned people an historic parallel. Nietzsche, who used that phrase in a famous book, was also the product of a romantic movement, the culmination of nineteenth-century German mysticism. He was also the son of a Protestant father. His theory of the Superman who existed outside of the merely artificially constructed codes of bourgeois culture inspired the Nazis. Like Nietzsche, Manson saw that the codes of society are artificial, contingent, socially-constructed, and thus unworthy of respect. Like Nietzsche, he believed himself capable of freeing himself from them and living on a higher plane. He saw the void, but rather than surrender to it, he believed he had what it took to fill the emptiness with a new and better structure.

Joan Didion was right. At the end of the antinomian Summer of Love, a rough beast was slouching toward Bethlehem. A potential Hitler was organizing his small but faithful army. More importantly, if it hadn't been Manson, it would have been someone else. All of those ideas were out there waiting to be brought together and applied. Romanticism, as Paglia warns, ends in decadence that then leads to Fascism. The Sixties themselves, though they began on a note of triumphant liberation ended up liberating too much too soon. Like the peasants at Munster in 1535, the counter-culture went too far too fast, not just ahead of society but ahead of itself.

In light of all this, for reporters to harp on the literal facts of who did what when during the murders often seems as absurd as showing "Reefer Madness" to high school kids to keep them from smoking pot. Once again, the adults haven't a clue. Until they address Manson's issues, they won't have any credibility either. Someone needs to address these questions in language that people understand. Otherwise, kids will turn to the Mansons among us for their answers. "A lot of the kids," says Manson, "never met anybody who told them the truth. They never had anybody who was truthful to them. You know, they never had anybody that wouldn't lie or snake or play old fake games. So all I did was I was honest with a bunch of kids." That is a powerful indictment of our society.

However appalled one must be by the literal reality of Manson, it is almost impossible not to also take him on the level of symbolic consciousness. "They don't want to ever let me go," he explains, "because they feel secure as long as they've got me locked up in that cell. They feel like, yeah, they've got THE MAN locked up right there in a box." Perhaps this is only literal; or perhaps Manson has taken over the role in society that black people used to play, the symbol of the terrors of the subconscious. We need to keep our rational consciousness safe from the chaos on the other side. So we lock up the subconscious under what Freud called the censor. And through the power of symbolic consciousness we imagine that by segregating black people, or locking Charlie Manson in a cell, we have the irrational forces of the subconscious under our rational control. We try to keep the conditioning going. We try to make the combine run more smoothly by adjusting everyone's programming so everyone will think and behave as they should. And yet the secondary meanings are always there. The literal continues to point to the symbolic for anyone able to read between the lines of the text. Even when, perhaps especially when it is least intended, the ironic meanings bring us up short.

At his last parole hearing, Manson was of course rejected. The parole board went through a long explanation why and listed a series of problems. The final problem, number five, reads as if a line from Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest, "The prisoner has not completed the necessary programming which is essential to his adjustment and needs additional time to gain such programming."

To which Manson has the final, chilling word, "Can't you see I'm out, man? Can't you see I'm out? Can't you see I'm free?

Since Charles Manson has never himself published anything in his own right, the best sources of his words are the many interviews he has conducted since being sent to prison.
A book by Nuel Emmons titled Manson: In His own Words (Grove 1986) is not in Manson’s own words at all but in the words of a former cellmate who saw a way to profit off his brief encounter. Tex Watson’s Will You Die For Me? (Revel 1978), while full of informative information, needs to be read in the context of its author’s attempt to evade his own responsibility. Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (Norton 1974) remains the definitive text on the Mason trial, written by the prosecutor himself. It is full of information and reliable quotations. When Manson was still on trial, an interview with David Felton appeared in the June 1970 Rolling Stone titled "Year of the Fork; Night of the Hunter." It was later published in a collection titled The MindFuckers: The Rise of Acid Fascism in America (Straight Arrow Books, 1972), to which I made a small introductory contribution. It is an excellent sourcebook. Also excellent is Ed Sanders The Family, (EP Dutton, 1971). Edward George’s Taming the Beast: Charles Manson’s Life Behind Bars (St. Martin’s, 1998) reveals its sensationalist bias in its title, but it does contain transcripts of Manson’s 1970, 1986, and 1992 parole hearings in a lengthy appendix. Much of this material once could be found on the website maintained by Manson’s confidant St George at http://www.atwa.com. Transcribed lyrics to several of his songs can be found in The Garbage People (Omega Press 1971) by John Gilmore and Ron Kenner.

---------------

BibliographyAmong the interviews given by Manson, including his parole interviews, for which I have either VHS videotapes or written transcripts and which I used for this piece are:1981 "The Tomorrow Show" with Tom Snyder1985 interview with "Maurie Povich" 1986 "Nightwatch" with Charlie Rose1989 "Inside story" with Patti Daniels1981 interview with Geraldo Rivera1991 Hard Copy Interview "Charlie Manson Today"1994 Diane Sawyer "Turning Point"Interview "The Manson Women"Parole Hearings:197019771982198619921997

Sunday, December 14, 2014

We at Mansonblog.com received unconfirmed word this morning from a souce who claimed to have called Corcoran to confirm that Charles Manson and Star had married this weekend. The same source is this evening stating that the marriage DID NOT happen after all:

"I would like dispel a rumor that was started this am after I personally
spoke with prison officials. I just spoke with Star, they are not
married, no date is set, the photo is from last week, and she begs that
people please stop calling the prison, or sending crazy letters to cm in
regards to this personal situation. I apologize for shit info from the
folk at Corcoran, however this is from the horses mouth."

The photo that the source is referring to was published this morning in the Daily Mail:

"A 'superfan' of Charles Manson appears to have carried out her vow to marry the 80-year-old notorious mass murderer.

Afton
Elaine Burton, who calls herself Star, was spotted outside her home on
Saturday proudly flaunting a new ring on her wedding finger."

Friday, December 12, 2014

CALIFORNIA, November 19, 2014 — It appears that notorious 80-year-old convicted serial killer Charles Manson has found his soul mate. Press releases indicate Manson is scheduled to be married next month to a young woman named Afton Burton. Burton, age 25, was re-named "Star" by Manson when she was 16 years old.

Is this potential union really the result of May-December love? Unlikely. It is more likely a strategic move by Manson and his best friend and family member, Craig Hammond. Manson is a complex and highly enigmatic personality. However, after having long conversations with Manson and developing a friendship with Hammond, I have some clear insight into Manson and his motivations.

In 2009, I had more than 3 1/2 hours of conversations with Manson. I also became friends with 63-year-old Hammond, who Manson calls "Grey Wolf." At that time, Burton and Hammond were living together close to the California Corcoran State Prison for Men so they could visit Manson as frequently as allowed.

Manson has a habit of nick-naming those close to him. "Star" and "Grey Wolf" are both names Manson picked.

Hammond and Manson met after the infamous "Manson Family Murders," so Hammond had no involvement and little knowledge of the bloody murders in August of 1969 which viciously and savagely took the lives of seven people in their homes in a two night spree.

After Manson's conviction, Hammond remained close to Manson. He has visited Manson and played chess with him for 45 years. Afton Burton is no more than a pawn in their ongoing game of chess.

Burton lived in Illinois with her parents and had written Manson many letters. Manson replied to those letter. When Burton was 16, Manson instructed her to move in with Hammond at his California residence. According to Hammond, Manson instructed Burton to "take care of him," meaning Hammond.

In 2009 when this author was speaking to Manson, Hammond and Burton, phone calls placed to Hammond would be frequently answered by Burton.

On one particular morning, Manson placed a call directly to this writer's office phone without the benefit of the prison communication system. The call came at 3 a.m. Manson explained the call by saying he had access to a guard's office, but a week later, every news source in America reported Manson was caught with an illegal cell phone.

After four years of quiet, Manson again made the news in concert with his friend Hammond. Press reported that Hammond was arrested for sneaking a watch type of cell phone into the prison. It appears that Hammond provided the means for Manson's cell phone in 2009.

As a result of the arrest, Hammond was banned from Corcoran and from all communication with Manson. This spelled trouble for Manson, as Hammond was Manson's lifeline to the outside world.

Additionally, Hammond and Burton were working hard for Manson's release, but this effort ground to a halt when Hammond was arrested.

What to do?

Manson is crafty. If he marries Burton, she will have spousal access to Manson, although his sentence precludes them from conjugal visits. Burton will access records kept from view for close to half a century and she can provide Manson a direct line to Hammond and vice versa.

Burton has given her life to Manson, so from her standpoint, she may be in love with Manson. However, last year when the marriage first became tabloid fodder, Manson steadfastly denied the possibility.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

This report was made after Moorehouse was found guilty in the second jury trial held to determine his guilt or innocence for selling LSD. The first trial ended in a hung jury.

Cielodrive.com has excellent background on Moorehouse and how he became involved with the Family. That information can be found HERE . Among the information provided are some documents showing that Moorehouse could not have occupied the Cielo Drive house between the time that Candace Bergen and Terry Melcher lived there and Roman and Sharon signed a lease. Bugliosi was flat out wrong when he stated this in his book and it seems to be one of the harder rumors to quash. Moorehouse was sent to prison January 2, 1969, the day after Bergen and Melcher moved out!

Monday, December 8, 2014

Welcome to Part 5 (Death Literal and Spiritual) of our 6 part series with Dr. Dave Williams, author of Searching For God in the Sixties. Each part is being presented on Mondays. Dr. Dave is making himself available to answer questions in the comments section.

Manson's message then to the hippies he picked up along the road was one they were ready to hear, that the rational world they had dropped out of was false and that new possibilities existed once they broke free of that mindset. "People only love each other in books," he said, "you can't love each other in reality because you're all trapped in books, locked up in wars. You are all locked up in the second world war…. I'm trying to unlock that war." As the war raged in Vietnam, with the generals and politicians all projecting Hitler's invasion of Poland onto Ho Chi Minh, this made sense. With segregation still rampant in the south, racism a curse throughout the nation, the cities burning in yearly riots, leaders assassinated, nuclear Armageddon threatened, the need to break away from the old games and enter a new dispensation seemed clear.

Manson's songs are perhaps the best example of this message. "Look at your game girl," the song that Axl Rose made infamous, is Manson trying to convince a young girl that it is all "a mad delusion,/ living in that confusion./Frustration and doubt./Can you ever live without your game?" So everything she is is a game, and she needs to realize that "You can tell those lies baby, but you're only fooling you." Every adolescent, every human being, has doubts which reach far into the soul. In the Sixties, a whole generation going through an intense identity crisis, faced doubts about the game we had all been taught. Manson's message was not unique, but communicated one on one to young, uneducated drop outs it came across as cosmically original.

One other song, "Ego is a too much thing," also brings down to a basic level a complex idea which was very much part of the mindset of the era. They have placed rationality, your reason, Blake's Urizen, in control, and shoved all the love into the back, "And they call it your subconscious." The computer up front demands to be in control; it demands to be accepted as you. It "makes you want to jump on a band and fight,/And you can't stand not to be right." It makes you "afraid you are gonna act like a clown/And you get mad when somebody puts you down." The answer to the problem of ego being a "too much thing", is to lose your ego: "Your certainty turns to doubt/And then you start flipping out,/And then you ease on out of your mind."

To lose one's ego is to lose one's common sense view of the world, to leave rationality behind. Included in all that is whatever social construct one was brought up to believe, be it Mormon Republicanism or Jewish liberalism or Roman Catholicism or scientific atheism. It does not matter. Each and every world view, conservative or radical, is just another world view, just another game. This anti-rationality therefore lends itself very easily to relativism, to the idea that all belief systems are equally valid, or invalid, but equally whatever value systems are. They are all "just games." Or as Manson once succinctly summed up the spirit of relativism, "Shit's like sugar to flies."

And the games all take place in an illusion of which even the concept of time plays a role. It is part of Manson's whole conception that the normal cause and effect relationships in which we all believe, including time, are themselves part of the illusion, part of the fallen world, not the Godhead from which it springs. There is only, he keeps saying, an eternal NOW. In this, he is saying nothing that mystics haven't said since the beginning of time. But in his mouth, the idea has important legal implications. If there is no time, there is no cause and effect; if there is no cause and effect, what ever he might have said was in a separate sphere from whatever his followers might have done. The circumstantial cause and effect connections that Bugliosi carefully put together have no meaning. "The idea," said Leslie Van Houghton in a recent cell block interview, "was to let time disappear. There was no time." Asked by Diane Sawyer what he expected would happen after he told the girls "you know what to do," Manson answered, "I don't live in anticipation, woman. I live in now."

As a capstone, there is the theory of language. "The Fall is into language," said Norman O. Brown, and Manson echoed that idea too. He blamed his conviction on the way the prosecutors "had to use catchy little words to make it into a reality, like hippie cult leader." In such ways, the illusions with which we live in the world are created and sustained by language. Language is the instrument of the illusion, of the fall. Said Manson,

That's what Jesus Christ taught us, words kill. They've filled every living thing with death. His disciples betrayed him by writing it down. Once it was written, it was as dead as a tombstone... They killed him with every word in the new Testament. Every word is another nail in the cross, another betrayal disguised as love. Every word is soaked with his blood. He said, "go, do thou likewise." He didn't say write it down. The whole fucking system is built on those words - the church, the government, war, the whole death trip. The original sin was to write it down.

If the fall is into language, as Brown had proclaimed, then words are the evil of the world. Words are the tools of deception and control, the way in which the illusion is maintained. They must be used carefully, if at all. Or they must be discredited to liberate people from the illusion that words actually "mean" anything. What, after all, does it even mean to "mean?" It's all just words trying to fool us into believing we know not what. There is no presence in the text.

The way, finally, to escape from the illusion was to surrender the letter and to accept some larger vision. This could be achieved by breaking the hold of language, the letter, which keeps us chained to the illusion of the rational. Once one realizes that words are just sounds and then passes beyond the illusion of inherent meaning or presence in the text, escape becomes possible. In the "Bug Letter," written from his cell, Manson provided an example of this process:

To write I must slow my mind down. I'm not human in my ways of thought and I don't want to be programmed by schools of thought what man is or what man is not, woman, etc." nature" has a balance. I want it like a hunger. I learn a universe in a look, in a flash. I could slow down and spell the word over and over until it hangs in my thought pattern and holds little bits and pieces of power. I try to clear all patterns out of my mind to where I can become a tree or woods, a mountain, a world, a universe. Sparks in my mind become the only pattern I crave.

The pattern here is one that had been part of Manson's Protestant background for centuries, a death and rebirth sequence; it was to be born again. He himself often told the story of his own death and rebirth experience in the desert. He even used the scriptural language to define it. About the kids on his ranch, he said, "I turned ‘em loose. They became free in their minds. We started a rebirth movement, a rebirth in Jesus Christ. It's a Holy War really." But so ignorant was he of the larger historical framework and its wider influence over so much of American culture that he once charged Jimmy Carter and the religious right with stealing his idea, as if he had thought it up first.

This explains his fixation with death and the need to die. This is the meaning of the song "Cease to Exist" which he wrote for Dennis Wilson and the Beach Boys and which they put out as a mere seduction song, "Cease to Resist." But as so often throughout the history of Christian hermeneutics, the question of literal and metaphorical readings is constantly a problem. To have stated clearly a distinction between the two would have been to embrace another duality. As Emerson said in "Brahma," "shadow and sunlight are the same." So Manson talked death to his followers, some of whom never did understand that there was even a question of whether he meant literal or spiritual death.

Yet, literal death is important as a way of talking about spiritual death. They really cannot be divided. The death of Jesus of Nazareth the incarnate human on the cross is a necessary symbol of the spiritual death of the soul that is conversion. We humans love ourselves, our bodies, our existence. We don't want to die. So this fear of death becomes an image or shadow of the greater fear of spiritual death, of eternal death - "To die and know it! This is it. This is the black widow, death." Fear and paranoia thus become a part of the package. When the old Adam starts to die, he panics trying to hold onto the old consciousness as it disintegrates in his mind leaving him exposed and naked.

When the old certainties disintegrate, anything suddenly becomes possible, absolutely anything. Images of the devil, of hell, of aliens farming humans for consumption on their home world, you name it. Manson's and the Beatles' message then to "let go and surrender to the void. It is not dying" was a push into a terrifying experience.

To realize that one is only playing a game, and then to watch oneself playing that game, and then to watch oneself watching oneself playing that game, is a terrifying fade back into the infinite upon infinite layers of consciousness until one's mind is as Jonathan Edwards said "swallowed up in God." Thus all the emphasis on exposing game-playing that one reads throughout the Sixties finally culminated here. We have all been programmed by the combine. We need to realize that we are programmed, that we don't know why we believe what we believe or do what we do, and we need to escape from those illusions. This is true liberation from all of the games that have been laid down for thousands of years of civilized history.

Growing up in prison, Manson had experienced a different reality, a different world entirely from that on the outside. In prison, little tolerance is shown for the pretensions that so often mark personalities in the outside world. There each individual is forced back on his or her own final line of defenses, reduced, like the soldiers in Vietnam, to an elemental struggle for survival that has no patience for the petty games that people play. "In the pen you learn this, " Manson told one interviewer, "don't lie. I stand on my own. Not many people in your world can do that. I didn't realize this at that particular time. I didn't realize how weak and mindless you people really are." When he got out, Manson simply did not comprehend that people on the outside really believe their own movies. He had no idea that people actually took their own games seriously. This may explain part of why he allowed the game to get out of hand. At a rare moment in his 1986 parole hearing, when asked if he felt any responsibility for the murders, Manson responded,

Sure, I influenced a lot of people unbeknownst to my own understanding of it. I didn't understand the fears of people outside. I didn't understand the insecurities of people outside. I didn't understand people outside. And a lot of things I said and did affected a lot of people in a lot of different directions. It wasn't intentional. It wasn't with malice aforethought.

But a few seconds later when asked if he also felt "remorse," which presumes guilt, Manson sat for a long time in silence before saying, in resignation, "we reach an impasse here, man."